Debate Scheduled in Minn. Senate Race

Walter F. Mondale and Norm Coleman will make time during their six-day sprint to replace the late Sen. Paul Wellstone for a debate on the eve of the election, their campaigns announced Saturday.

Meanwhile, both sides turned their attention Saturday for the first time to trustworthiness and national security -- the topics that had divided the race before Wellstone was killed in a plane crash Oct. 25.

Mondale, the Democrat and former vice president who jumped into the campaign after Wellstone’s death, asked voters to think about who they would trust more in the Senate. Wellstone, in speeches and advertising, repeatedly suggested Coleman couldn’t be trusted.

“Who do you trust? That’s a big thing in politics because words don’t mean anything unless there is trust,” Mondale said to voters in Virginia, one of several towns he visited in northern Minnesota, a traditionally Democratic region dominated by mining and forestry.

Coleman, a former St. Paul mayor, toured southern Minnesota, a farm-rich area that tends to vote Republican. He also gingerly returned to some of the issues that separated him and Wellstone.

“I will work with our president to make sure our nation is secure,” Coleman said, without specifically mentioning Wellstone’s vote against a resolution authorizing President Bush to use military force in Iraq. The House and Senate overwhelmingly passed the resolution; Mondale earlier this week said he would have voted against it.

The candidates will get their first and only chance to hit on those and other issues when they meet head to head in Monday morning’s debate at the Fitzgerald Theater.

“I think it’s important for voters to hear the vice president at this point,” Coleman said.